Latest news with #DanNeidle
Telegraph
23-05-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Labour-supporting tax expert slams Rayner's raid on taxpayers
A Labour-supporting tax campaigner has slammed Angela Rayner's proposals to reintroduce the lifetime allowance and freeze the top rate of tax threshold. The influential tax expert Dan Neidle said a number of the tax rises contained in Ms Rayner's leaked memo could deter investment in UK companies and undermine 'the progressivity of the tax system'. He also questioned whether some of the proposals could raise as much as the Deputy Prime Minister had suggested. The Telegraph revealed on Tuesday that Ms Rayner sent a secret memo urging Rachel Reeves to raise taxes instead of cutting spending. Mr Neidle is the founder of think tank Tax Policy Associates and also a member of Labour, however he has been critical of the party's policies in the past. The tax lawyer said that half of Ms Rayner's proposals 'make sense from a policy perspective', including closing the commercial property stamp duty loophole and removing inheritance tax relief on Aim shares. However he poked holes in some of the calculations on her memo. For example, he told The Telegraph that closing the stamp duty loophole for commercial property could raise anywhere between £700m or £2bn, as opposed to the estimate of £1bn cited in Ms Rayner's memo.
Business Mayor
14-05-2025
- Automotive
- Business Mayor
How EV subsidies are taking the UK back to the 1970s
Stay informed with free updates Simply sign up to the UK tax myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox. It's my fault. Last year, the Financial Times introduced a new salary sacrifice scheme, enabling employees to lease and drive an electric vehicle on the cheap. The scheme promises savings of 'up to 40 per cent'. I love a bargain and, although I don't need or really want an EV right now, I was intrigued by the offer. Having registered, I plugged lots of different fake salary levels into the system, changed my age and altered my address to get a sense of the underlying dynamics of the scheme, which also included car insurance. Of course, that activity made me look extremely interested and I have subsequently been plagued by the EV provider trying to get me to sign on the dotted line. Having done the maths, the deal was indeed pretty good, although the examples I looked at were barely worthwhile if you were a normal basic rate or a higher rate taxpayer. The offer saved a lot of money if your salary was in the £100,000 to £125,140 pay bracket, where people in the UK lose their personal tax allowance and pay a combined income tax and employee national insurance rate (the UK's social security tax) of 62 per cent. For someone needing to get their salary below £100,000 to be able to receive more value in free childcare, salary sacrifice schemes such as this are a no brainer. The FT would save 15 per cent in lower employer national insurance contributions and there are also some value added tax benefits. Employees would be charged a 3 per cent benefit in kind tax on the implied value of the benefit they were receiving in lieu of pay. I emailed one much-to-be-pitied representative of the provider, asking why they could not offer lower prices when there were enormous possibilities for tax avoidance. Not surprisingly I didn't get much joy and was told, correctly, that I would still be better off if I signed up rather than leased an EV from my after tax salary. What is going on? Employers save some money in payroll taxes, employees get something of a bargain depending on their circumstances, providers have a potentially profitable business and this complicated web supplying EVs is hugely subsidised by other taxpayers. This is an extremely poor example of public policy. Governments have an absolutely legitimate desire to speed the rollout of EVs, but they should just offer simple discounts, not opaque and massive subsidies to employers exploiting company car taxation rules and extremely high marginal rates in the UK income tax system available only for certain individuals. Although EVs are very much the technology of the future, the UK's subsidy scheme is a throwback to the 1970s. Then, the highest marginal income tax rate was 83 per cent on earned income. This was levied on pay levels as low as £120,000 in today's prices. But almost no one paid these tax rates. In a recent analysis, Dan Neidle of the not-for-profit Tax Policy Associates highlighted the tax avoidance opportunities of the 1970s. There were lax tax rules for benefits in kind. High earners routinely took pay in other forms, whether it was company cars, luncheon vouchers, club memberships or extremely generous pensions. The decades since have seen governments clamp down on loopholes, allowing them to collect more from those on high incomes at much lower tax rates. But in recent years, extreme tax rates have stormed back with the withdrawal of both child benefits and personal allowances at £100,000, as well as a cliff edge on subsidised childcare. It is not environmentalism but tax that is driving the emergence of salary sacrifice EV deals, encouraging a tax avoidance industry that does nothing for Britain's productivity or public finances. There are colleagues of mine with young children who would be better off if they signed up to the electric vehicle scheme, drove the car to their parents' driveway and parked it up for three years. That is nuts.
Yahoo
02-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
How tax rules our politics (and lives)
Tax lawyer and journalist Dan Neidle opened his series Untaxing (Radio 4) with two extraordinary statements. One, that he was going to show how tax is one of the most significant and consequential forces in our lives. Two, that Albert Einstein was wrong about tax when he said it was the most difficult thing in the world to understand. Far be it from me to argue about tax with a man who founded a think tank called Tax Policy Associates and who advises the Scottish Government (among others) on tax issues, but his first point hardly needs proving to anyone. Ever since we learnt the story of Robin Hood, we've known tax as a fifth element in our lives. As for Einstein, well, having listened ahead to all five episodes of Untaxing, I am tempted to agree with the physicist. Neidle's series makes our tax systems seem arcane, opaque, fantastical, occasionally deranged, often frustrating and always baffling. Despite that – or perhaps because of it – it's a terrific series, filled with anecdote and insight, that will leave you with the feeling you should pay far more attention to tax beyond your payslip, the Budget and the adventures of Little John et al. Monday's opener was all about a napkin – 'the napkin that changed the world' – and revealed both Neidle's ability to zero in on quirks of history that prove to be seismic and how ideology and politicking give tax a bad name. The napkin was on a restaurant table in Washington DC in 1974, and scribbling on it was a young economist named Arthur Laffer. Watching him doodle a graph, with ever-widening eyes, were White House officials Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. What the doodle 'proved' was that if you raise taxes too much, revenues will actually go down. Though disputed, the 'Laffer Curve' is still popular today – it is regularly cited by, among others, Liz Truss, while in 2019 Donald Trump awarded Laffer the Presidential Medal of Freedom, referencing the famous napkin. The napkin is a Shroud of Turin for those who seek low taxation, but tax ideology works both ways. Recently, the Scottish Government raised the top rate of income tax to 48 per cent, which some believe will scare off higher earners and lead to less revenue. And what did Neidle and his colleagues at the Scottish Government's Tax Advisory Group have to say about this? 'Nothing,' said Neidle. 'Because they didn't ask us. It was pure politics.' More tax theory drawn up on the back of napkins. Yesterday delved into the murky story of the Beatles' inventive but ultimately flawed efforts to avoid income tax (surely Eleanor Rigby would have benefited from some of their revenues?), a tale that ultimately ended in Michael Jackson selling the rights to Lennon & McCartney's songs to pay his own tax bill. Today's episode is on Jaffa Cakes, tomorrow's on a porn-star lawyer who played a part in the downfall of Rangers Football Club. Neidle cherrypicks the minutiae expertly. The overall impression is of the British tax system as a towering, teetering, rickety old building, with extension built upon extension, and all sorts of oddities lurking in the basement. Five 15-minute episodes isn't nearly enough – I hope Radio 4 have Neidle back soon. Also managing to be riveting on an ostensibly dry economic subject was Invisible Hands (Radio 4), which is looking at the birth of the free market. That it's so compelling is no surprise, given that the man behind it is David Dimbleby, who shares Neidle's ability to extrapolate world-changing ideas from the smallest of moments. This first episode, for instance, found the origins of the free market in the downing of a Hurricane fighter plane in August 1940, the Egg Marketing Board and a copy of the Reader's Digest. Jo Barratt's production had the swing and sway (and the background music) of a juicy true-crime podcast, with Dimbleby gamely showing he could mix it with the young pups of podcasting. Here, it's all about storytelling. 'It turns out it's a much stranger story than you can imagine,' began Dimbleby, as the music grew more insistent. It's shameless, but I was hooked. And when that Reader's Digest came along, Dimbleby introduced it like this: 'A magazine that would change the course of Antony Fisher's life… and the history of this country – forever.' He even gave us the little details – in that edition, alongside the all-important article The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek, were pieces on 'strange animal friendships, the beard of Joseph Palmer and shepherds of the underground', a list of subjects that would fit quite pleasingly into Radio 4's schedules. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
02-04-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
How tax rules our politics (and lives)
Tax lawyer and journalist Dan Neidle opened his series Untaxing (Radio 4) with two extraordinary statements. One, that he was going to show how tax is one of the most significant and consequential forces in our lives. Two, that Albert Einstein was wrong about tax when he said it was the most difficult thing in the world to understand. Far be it from me to argue about tax with a man who founded a think tank called Tax Policy Associates and who advises the Scottish Government (among others) on tax issues, but his first point hardly needs proving to anyone. Ever since we learnt the story of Robin Hood, we've known tax as a fifth element in our lives. As for Einstein, well, having listened ahead to all five episodes of Untaxing, I am tempted to agree with the physicist. Neidle's series makes our tax systems seem arcane, opaque, fantastical, occasionally deranged, often frustrating and always baffling. Despite that – or perhaps because of it – it's a terrific series, filled with anecdote and insight, that will leave you with the feeling you should pay far more attention to tax beyond your payslip, the Budget and the adventures of Little John et al. Monday's opener was all about a napkin – 'the napkin that changed the world' – and revealed both Neidle's ability to zero in on quirks of history that prove to be seismic and how ideology and politicking give tax a bad name. The napkin was on a restaurant table in Washington DC in 1974, and scribbling on it was a young economist named Arthur Laffer. Watching him doodle a graph, with ever-widening eyes, were White House officials Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. What the doodle 'proved' was that if you raise taxes too much, revenues will actually go down. Though disputed, the 'Laffer Curve' is still popular today – it is regularly cited by, among others, Liz Truss, while in 2019 Donald Trump awarded Laffer the Presidential Medal of Freedom, referencing the famous napkin. The napkin is a Shroud of Turin for those who seek low taxation, but tax ideology works both ways. Recently, the Scottish Government raised the top rate of income tax to 48 per cent, which some believe will scare off higher earners and lead to less revenue. And what did Neidle and his colleagues at the Scottish Government's Tax Advisory Group have to say about this? 'Nothing,' said Neidle. 'Because they didn't ask us. It was pure politics.' More tax theory drawn up on the back of napkins. Yesterday delved into the murky story of the Beatles ' inventive but ultimately flawed efforts to avoid income tax (surely Eleanor Rigby would have benefited from some of their revenues?), a tale that ultimately ended in Michael Jackson selling the rights to Lennon & McCartney's songs to pay his own tax bill. Today's episode is on Jaffa Cakes, tomorrow's on a porn-star lawyer who played a part in the downfall of Rangers Football Club. Neidle cherrypicks the minutiae expertly. The overall impression is of the British tax system as a towering, teetering, rickety old building, with extension built upon extension, and all sorts of oddities lurking in the basement. Five 15-minute episodes isn't nearly enough – I hope Radio 4 have Neidle back soon. Also managing to be riveting on an ostensibly dry economic subject was Invisible Hands (Radio 4), which is looking at the birth of the free market. That it's so compelling is no surprise, given that the man behind it is David Dimbleby, who shares Neidle's ability to extrapolate world-changing ideas from the smallest of moments. This first episode, for instance, found the origins of the free market in the downing of a Hurricane fighter plane in August 1940, the Egg Marketing Board and a copy of the Reader's Digest. Jo Barratt's production had the swing and sway (and the background music) of a juicy true-crime podcast, with Dimbleby gamely showing he could mix it with the young pups of podcasting. Here, it's all about storytelling. 'It turns out it's a much stranger story than you can imagine,' began Dimbleby, as the music grew more insistent. It's shameless, but I was hooked. And when that Reader's Digest came along, Dimbleby introduced it like this: 'A magazine that would change the course of Antony Fisher's life… and the history of this country – forever.' He even gave us the little details – in that edition, alongside the all-important article The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek, were pieces on 'strange animal friendships, the beard of Joseph Palmer and shepherds of the underground', a list of subjects that would fit quite pleasingly into Radio 4's schedules.
